This article was first posted in the ODI Blog

I’ve been talking about the importance of inequality to everyone in Peru who cares to listen for quite some time now. When I left Peru over six years ago, this ‘inequality’ concept was a term used by a few social and economic researchers with poor communication skills. We had not yet figured out how to explain why it mattered that not everyone benefited from growth in the same way (and at the time we were still in a recession) and resorted to pointing at the persistence of extreme absolute poverty. ...   more »

The first semester of 2008 saw the real price of the main food staples climb to a 30 year peak. The food riots in Haiti and the highly politicized “Sovereignty and Food Security: Food for Life” Presidential Summit held in Managua, Nicaragua on the May 7th have brought issues of trade, international aid and crisis mechanisms to the forefront of the regional political and economic agenda. Growing concern over food security and price vulnerability was clearly reflected by the Summit’s call for a regional production and distribution strategy for fairly priced food as well as for a review ...   more »

Comercio y Pobreza en Latinoamérica (COPLA) aims to use research based evidence to strengthen and promote an improved dialogue between policymakers, researchers and those institutions that represent the poor to incorporate new issues into the policy debate.

 A couple of years ago, when the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Peru was still being negotiated, a friend who had worked in the Peruvian Ministry of Trade and had been involved in the negotiations told me that studies about the effects of the agreement on poverty had been commissioned but not been made public. Why? Because they ...   more »

Tough Times Ahead for Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner

Aaron Goldfarb 8 August 2007

After presiding over an impressive fifth year of economic expansion in Argentina, President Nestor Kirchner could have easily won a second term in the upcoming October elections. Instead, Kirchner is stepping aside to let his wife, Cristina Fernandez, seek the presidency. Cristina, who has often been compared to Hilary Clinton, has been a leading figure in the Senate for the past four years. Though her approval rating is not as high as her husband’s, Cristina (as she likes to be known) is still heavily favoured ...   more »

Costa Rica switched diplomatic relations from Taiwan to Mainland China earlier this month, citing economic reasons as the deciding factor. Costa Rica’s realignment is a small example of how Chinese "checkbook diplomacy" is reshaping Latin American politics. By financing multi-billion dollar infrastructure and public works projects in Latin America, China is receiving contracts for raw materials and foodstuffs that will feed the appetite of its ever expanding economy. On his 2005 tour, President Hu Jintao spoke of a US$100 billion investment in South American infrastructure over the next ten years. Clearly, China is laying the path for a long-lasting presence ...   more »

The World Bank released its annual “governance indicators” yesterday – a set of six variables which is designed to measure governance globally.  The project has many critics, broadly falling into two camps – those that oppose the idea on principle and argue that the World Bank should not be in the business of rating countries on governance or any other metric, and those that find fault with the indicators methodology, which could accurately be described as a “kitchen sink” approach to measuring corruption, political stability and other categories of governance with surveys and other imprecise metrics....   more »

When DFID withdrew their bilateral programmes in Honduras, Peru and Bolivia, civil society was fast to point out that, among other things, there were many poor Latin Americans who needed urgent assistance. DFID should have stayed to look after them. There are other reasons too for supporting DFID’s direct involvement in Latin American countries. DFID left a space in policy debate that was not filled by other donors (or by the government) and many of the progressive ideas it had supported have suffered to remain in the policy and research agendas.

ODI’s mid-term evaluation of DFID’s RAP...   more »

The volume of remittances hit the headlines last week on the BBC and One World websites.  The BBC reported that remittances to Latin America are now $62bn, more than aid and foreign direct investment combined. 

This figure has attracted the interest of development policymakers. How, they ask, can remittances be harnessed as an effective development tool? The answer is as yet unknown. What we do know is that the majority of migrants send home small amounts, around $100 to $150 a month.  Charges are incurred per transaction meaning remittances are big business.  One current line of inquiry is what governments ...   more »

In this conference organised by LSE’s Peruvian Society, speakers reflected on how the new political map of Latin America is influencing Peru’s integration into transnational markets and what this tells us about the opportunities and challenges facing developing countries when interacting in the global economy. Speakers were Dr. Ricardo Luna (Peruvian Ambassador in the UK), Dr. John Crabtree (Centre for Latin American Studies, Oxford University) and Mr. Richard Ralph  (former British Ambassador in Peru (2003-2006) and current chairman of a UK mining company working in Peru). The conference was chaired by LSE’s Dr Evan Killick....   more »